Investors — certainly U.S. stock investors — would be wise to keep one eye on the price of oil, currently pushing $90 per barrel. Oil traded up 10 cents to $89.29 on Monday at mid-day.

And the reason is obvious enough: once again, oil is approaching the danger zone, from a U.S. GDP growth standpoint.

No one knows precisely at what point oil begins to substantially hinder consumer spending and slow commercial activity — but this much is known: every $1 per barrel rise in oil decreases U.S. GDP by $100 billion per year and every 1 cent increase in gasoline decreases U.S. consumer disposable income by about $600 million per year.

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If the average U.S. price of gasoline, currently about $2.94 per gallon for unleaded regular, rises and stays above $3, that would cause consumers to think that ‘higher gasoline prices are ahead,’ and they’ll likely adjust their discretionary spending. Similarly, an oil price that rises and stays above above $100 per barrel has a similar psychological effect.

I was confident that the Fed had already begun printing. That seemed quite evident by the overall action in the commodity markets, the dollar, and the fact that stocks were unable to correct in the normal timing band for a daily cycle low. However, I didn’t really expect Ben would come out and publicly admit it. That one took me by surprise Thursday. I guess Bernanke wants to get full value for his attack on the dollar and make sure that markets are rising into the election.

At this point all the pieces are in place for the inflationary spike and currency crisis I’ve been predicting for 2014. We now have open-ended QE that is tied to economic output and unemployment. But since debasing currencies has historically never been the cure for the bursting of a credit bubble, all the Fed is going to produce is spiraling inflation. So as this progresses we are going to see the Fed printing faster and faster as the result they are looking for never materializes. This is what will ultimately drive the currency crisis at the dollar’s next three year cycle low in 2014.

At this point, watch the price of oil if you want to know when the next recession is going to begin. As I’ve pointed out many times in the past, recessions (well, at least since World War II) have all been preceded by a sharp spike in the price of energy.

Any move of 100% or more in a year or less, has historically been the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Modern economies cannot survive that kind of shock. It invariably triggers the collapse of…

“The connection between oil shocks and recessions has been understood for decades. We have ample historical evidence that when petroleum expenditures reach 5% of GDP, recession typically follows. Annual energy expenditures rose from 6.2% of U.S. GDP in 2002 to a painful 9.8% in 2008, which was immediately followed by an economic crash. And now oil is sending energy expenditures back above 9% of GDP, just as we see fresh indications that the recession persists. This is not a coincidence.”

In the financial world, the month of October is synonymous with stock market crashes. So will a massive stock market crash happen this year? You never know. The truth is that our financial system is even more vulnerable than it was back in 2008, and financial experts such as Doug Short, Peter Schiff, Robert Wiedemer and Harry Dent are all warning that the next crash is rapidly approaching. We are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world and Wall Street has been transformed into a giant casino that is based on a massive web of debt, risk and leverage. When that web breaks we are going to see a stock market crash that is going to make 2008 look like a Sunday picnic. Yes, the Federal Reserve has tried to prevent any problems from erupting in the financial markets by initiating another round of quantitative easing, but 40 billion dollars a month will not be nearly enough to stop the massive collapse that is coming. This will be explained in detail toward the end of the article. Hopefully we will get through October (and the rest of this year) without seeing a stock market collapse, but without a doubt one is coming at some point. Those on the wrong end of the coming crash are going to be absolutely wiped out.

A lot of people focus on the month of October because of the history of stock market crashes in this month. This history was detailed in a recent USA Today article….

When it comes to wealth suddenly disappearing, October can be diabolically frightful. The stock market crash of 1929 that led to the Great Depression occurred in October. So did the 22.6% plunge suffered by the Dow Jones industrial average in 1987 on “Black Monday.”

The scariest 19-day span during the 2008 financial crisis also went down in October, when the Dow plunged 2,675 points after investors fearing a financial collapse went on a panic-driven stock-selling spree that resulted in five of the 10 biggest daily point drops in the iconic Dow’s 123-year history.

So what will we see this year?

Only time will tell.

If a stock market crash does not happen this month or by the end of this year, that does not mean that the experts that are predicting a stock market crash are wrong.

It just means that they were early.

As I have said so many times, there are thousands upon thousands of moving parts in the global financial system. So that makes it nearly impossible to predict the timing of events with perfect precision. Financial conditions are constantly shifting and changing.

But without a doubt another major financial collapse similar to what happened back in 2008 (or even worse) is on the way. Let’s take a look at some of the financial experts that are predicting really bad things for our financial markets in the months ahead….

Revenue streams are drying up as China’s growth slows & Europe reels from crisis to crisis. It’s looking so bad

This earnings season threatens to be one of the roughest since U.S. companies started to pull themselves out of the Great Recession — even if, as usual, results don’t live up to the worst of the gloom-and-doom forecasts.

Revenue streams are drying up as China’s growth slows and Europe reels from crisis to crisis. Companies are finding fewer places to cut costs. It’s looking so bad, in fact, that results won’t have to be that great to inject a burst of optimism into the market. Quarterly earnings season kicks off next week with reports from Alcoa Inc. (US:AA) and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (US:JPM)

On the whole, profits for the S&P 500 (US:SPX) in the three months ended in September are forecast to drop 2.6% from the year-ago quarter, according to a FactSet analyst survey. If results match expectations, the quarter will break a streak of 11 straight quarterly gains that reaches back to late 2009, as Corporate America was clawing its way out of a financial crisis and severe recession that ended in June of that year.

Wall Street is likely responding to downbeat cues from companies, who have collectively given one of the most negative earnings outlooks in several years.